With Friends Like These, Can Dubya Afford Enemies?

The coming election season has often been made out to be liberal versus conservative, Republican against Democrat. But what happens when conservatives start revolting against the President, such as Pat Buchanan calling for the impeachment of the President for his inaction over illegal immigration? That isn't something I would think would be an impeachable offense, but Mr. Buchanan marches to a different drummer.

Long time readers of his columns would know the conservative viewpoints of Paul Mulshine of the Newark Star-Ledger. Thursday's column returns to one of his favorite topics:

What happened to the George W. we first elected?
Thursday, September 28, 2006

A wise man once said that whenever America goes to war, "The force must be strong enough so that the mission can be accomplished. And the exit strategy needs to be well-defined." What happened to that guy? He got elected president, that's what. And all that power seems to have gone to George W. Bush's head, crowding out any wisdom rattling around in there.

The release the other day of the National Intelligence Estimate provides further proof of how far Bush has strayed from the principles of small-government conservatism he espoused when he
first ran for president back in 2000. At that time, he also observed, "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building." Once in office, however, Bush decided to start building nations almost halfway around the globe.

The result, says the NIE, is that the failed nation-building experiment in Iraq has become a cause celebre" for Islamic terrorists all over the world. Coincidentally enough, the release of the report, which represents the consensus of the nation's intelligence agencies, came right after another significant milestone in the so-called "War on Terror." Last week, the American death toll from the nation-building exercises in Afghanistan and Iraq invasion grew to exceed the death toll of 2,973 resulting from the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Almost all of those deaths are the result of Bush's abandonment of the two principles he embraced as a candidate: the need for overwhelming force and for an exit strategy. Those were excellent principles, but he seemed to have forgotten them in the heady days after the Iraq invasion.

"There are some who feel like conditions are such that they can attack us there," said Bush on July 1, 2003. "My answer is bring them on. We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."

Oops. It turns out that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had neglected to come up with a plan for the security situation. And that in turn permitted Iraq, which was almost entirely devoid of terrorists under Saddam Hussein, to become a hotbed of terrorism. Here's what the NIE says about that:

"We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere."

Bush reacted to the report by stating of the terrorists, "My judgment is, if we weren't in Iraq, they'd find some other excuse, because they have ambitions."

But if we weren't in Iraq, the terrorists couldn't attack us at will with primitive weapons.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA operative, has compiled on his Web site (http://noquarter.typepad.com) a bar graph of terror attacks on Americans as reported by the State Department in its publication "Patterns of Global Terrorism." The graph shows worldwide terror incidents running at less than 500 annually from 1992 to 2003. Then suddenly in 2004 the attacks skyrocketed to more than 2,500 a year as the Iraqi insurgency picked up steam.

"The Bush administration has played politics with the numbers," Johnson told me. "They initially were not going to publish the report because the number of terrorist incidents had surged so dramatically. It would be difficult to explain how they were winning the war on terror when the number of incidents was rising."

The ostensible reason for the invasion of Iraq was the threat that Saddam supposedly posed to the United States. But even before the invasion, the CIA had been telling Bush that Iraq's efforts at terrorism were directed toward Israel and Iran, not the U.S., Johnson said.

"Once you decide the CIA is the enemy, you ignore what they tell you," said Johnson.

Instead of listening to the intelligence experts, Bush paid attention to the various neoconservative think-tank types, the "true believers," in the words of Bob Baer, another former CIA agent who worked in the Mideast. The neocons' poor planning got thousands of Americans killed while stoking the terrorist movement, he said.

"It's as if al Qaeda were running the White House," said Baer. "I don't see how they could do it any better. Everything we do is as if we were fueling a jihad."

In 1995, Baer was involved in fomenting a coup inside Iraq that involved five Iraqi generals who would have deposed Saddam and replaced him with what Baer calls "a Saddam light."

"A light police state is what we wanted," he said. "The only people who are going to police the Iraqis are Iraqis."

Instead, we got Bush's grandiose scheme to create a democracy. That sounds good in theory, but in practice it meant handing Iraq over to the Shi'a majority, thus creating a new ally for Iran and its anti-American leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"Ahmadinejad probably gets up each morning and looks in the mirror and pinches himself and
says, 'I can't believe it.'"

I can't believe it, either. This sure wasn't what candidate Bush promised us back in 2000. Here's another quote from that campaign: "If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road."

Well, at least he got that right.

Paul Mulshine is a Star-Ledger columnist. He may be reached at pmulshine@starledger.com.

Fiddling While Rome Burns

It is a depressing list of foreign policy mistakes, disasters, and otherwise general bad news: Iraq is at best treading water, and at worst spiraling into civil war; Iran is blatantly moving ahead with plans for nuclear weapons; The Taliban are slowly creeping back into power in Afghanistan; The North Koreans test-fired a long range missile capable of reaching the West Coast of the United States; and the Israelis are fighting a war with Hezbollah on the frontier with Lebanon, eerily reminiscent of the 1978 invasion that led Hezbollah's creation.

And what is the most significant action taken by the Bush Administration in the past week? The first-ever veto by this Administration, five-plus years into power, of a bill. About stem-cells. A morally powerful but generally insignificant piece of legislation.

Last week the President, renowned as NOT one of the United Nation's biggest fans, was musing aloud to British PM Tony Blair about the current crisis in Lebanon and the UN's activities there, in front of an open microphone at the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia. "See the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this (expletive) and it's over." He then went on to express to Mr. Blair that he feels "like telling Kofi to get on the phone with [Syrian President Bashar] Assad and make something happen."

Does anyone else see the irony in this? (There certainly is a lot of it, here. I am just not sure that the President understands exactly what is ironic about this whole affair.)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, gas prices are spiraling out of control, the economy is coming to a rip-roaring halt, Congress is spending money like a drunken sailor on shore leave, the Department of Homeland Security has done absolutely nothing to improve Homeland Security in the almost five years since September 11, 2001, and we are in the early stages of a hurricane season which promises to resemble the Monday-morning rush at the Lincoln Tunnel.

And the President finally remembers that he can veto legislation by the Congress.

The second Tuesday of November 2008 can't come here fast enough.

President to America: Oil is getting more expensive. Too bad.

Wednesday's NY Daily News had a column by Michael Goodwin that is sure to not bring a comforting thought to any Republican contemplating a run for re-election this fall. Goodwin - whose two favorite targets are Hillary and Dubya - compared the President's most recent "I feel your pain" speech on rising oil prices to Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech in the seventies.

While it is true that reality is that the President can't really do much to affect oil prices (See Dan Cleary's blog on this subject), the perception is much more important. While the average American doesn't seem to know that the price of gas is affected by a number of factors - OPEC pricing, refining capacity, political stability in regions with large reserves, problems with delivery - they understand one thing: they are paying a whole lot more than they used to. They don't want to hear a president tell them there's nothing he can do about it. They think, "He's the most powerful man on the planet for cryin' out loud."

If I were a Republican candidate for dog-catcher, I'd be trying to put as much daylight between me and the President right about now.

FEMA Update

President Bush nominated the acting Director of FEMA, R. David Paulison, to take over the position permanently. A good move.

The Border

Charles Krauthammer has an excellent column in today's Washington Post on what to do with the border and dealing with the estimated 11 million illegals already here.

Tempest in a Seaport, Part II

After years of beating Democrats over the head on issues of Security, the Republicans are getting a taste of their own bludgeoning. As of this writing, the purchase of operations at six major US ports has been officially killed. The government of Dubai has said that they will turn over all US Port operations included in the purchase of P&O Ports to a "United States entity." Ironically, I don't necessarily agree with it.

As I said before, I think the sinking of this deal is not a good idea. It doesn't make sense economically, and security really isn't the issue. But, as we all know, perception doesn't often equate with reality. Democrats have found an issue they can hammer the Republicans on. Sure, getting the measure killed in committee by an overwhelming margin blunts the impact a bit, but the baseline sentiment, that the current Administration has gone off the reservation on their core issue, remains. The Republicans should brace themselves. I don't blame the Democrats and Republicans should have seen this coming.

Before anyone accuses the Democrats, however, of getting a bit whacky, as the New York Times and Boston Globe the other day apparently did, the junior senators from New York and New Jersey introduced a bill - S.2334 - to ban all companies owned by foreign governments from controlling port operations in the United States. This is a sensible measure, and would not affect operations at most ports in the country, some 80% of which are controlled by foreign entities.

As mentioned in a previous post, however, whoever controls the ports does not control security at said ports. This still rests with the Department of Homeland Security, which currently is able to inspect only one in every twenty shipping containers, and which often relies on the inspection at the other end to ferret out suspicious cargo. For the obvious reasons of manpower and budget, priority is given to those that originate in suspect locales, as well as any that raise a red flag for one reason or another. Your average container originating in, say, London or Tokyo, is not going to be inspected. So to say that ownership of terminal operations by Dubai Ports World would undercut security is not terribly accurate. If the bad guys wanted smuggle something in, they could easily do so in any number of overseas ports, using any number of shipping companies.

No, perception doesn't often equate with reality.

Tempest in a Seaport

This may come as a shock to you, but politicians are opportunists. I'll give you a moment to pick yourself up off the floor.

This revelation has been demonstrated with amazing clarity by members of both political parties in the matter of DPW, as in Dubai Ports World (not the Department of Public Works), the firm that purchased P&O, the British company that currently operates terminals at six major ports, including Newark, New York, and Miami. Lawmakers of both stripes were getting run over in the rush to the microphone to decry this deal.

Of course, that's an easy thing to do if you are a Democrat. It takes no imagination to see that this would be an issue you could grab and run with all the way to November's mid-term elections, using it as political cover in debates on national security.

Republicans, however, seem bent on using this as a different kind of cover, mostly to shield themselves from the political vegetables being hurled by a disaffected electorate at them while on the stage. Even House speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist came out and said, "hold on there a moment, George." Who would have thought that Frist, Hastert, and Hillary Clinton would be on the same side in an issue?

Well, Hastert and Clinton, anyway. Less than a week after he got up there and expressed righteous indignation that the Bush administration was turning over control of these ports (and lesser operations at sixteen other facilities) to a foreign company - who did he think the owners of P&O were before, I'd like to know - Frist said he felt "more comfortable with the deal" after the Administration agreed to a 45-day review. This guy makes better waffles than John Kerry.

But now for the other shoe: opposing this deal may actually be a bad thing. I'll wait another moment while you recover from that revelation.

Don't get me wrong. I think that this whole fiasco is littered with wrong turns and faux pas. On the face of it, it's a horrible public relations nightmare: operations at major ports will be in the hands of a company owned by the United Arab Emirates, where two of the 19 attackers on September 11th were from, and where money connected to the 9/11 attacks was laundered through. At the very least someone in the current Administration should have had the brains to recognize that this required a public relations campaign well in advance of any sale.

But wait, it gets better. Instead of the standard 45-day review of sales of this nature by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is required when any of the 12 members express national security concerns - in this case, raised at least by the US Coast Guard, part of the Department of Homeland Security - it only gets a 30-day look-see.

Finally, Scott McClellan admits that the President was not aware of the transaction until after the brouhaha hit the papers. This is an Administration that is becoming increasingly tone-deaf politically.

This does not obscure the fact that sinking this deal would pose a bigger problem than allowing it to proceed. For one thing, it sends the absolutely wrong message to the moderates of the Arab world that we will cave to political pressure (but the French already knew that). If there is ever a section of the world we need friends, its the Middle East.

It would also discourage other nations from investing in the United States if such investment were to meet with a xenophobic attitude. What most people fail to realize is that some 90 ports nationwide are run in whole or in part by foreign companies. That is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg when you consider other foreign investment in the United States.

Finally, people are apparently misled into believing that this sale would immediately undercut national security by allowing DPW to control what is brought into the United States. This is patently ludicrous. In essence this deal would put DPW into the role of logistics management - in other words, responsible for efficiently moving the goods and products into and out of the ports - and not arbiter of what comes in and what doesn't. Security is still the purview of Homeland Security, and the real scandal is how poorly it is doing that job. If the terrorists wanted to move a dirty bomb or some other horrific weapon into the United States, they would have done it by now. DPW in charge doesn't give them an in, just a smoother ride around where it goes.

No. If the terrorists are coming they are already here. Inspection of only one in twenty containers by the Department of Homeland Security is seeing to that.

FEMA

FEMA. A four-letter acronym, not a four letter word, at least not to me.

Recently there have been numerous calls for some sort of change at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, ranging from moving it around within the Department of Homeland Security, taking it out of Homeland Security, or disbanding it entirely then rebuilding it, as Senator Lieberman of Connecticut has proposed. It is obvious that a change is necessary, but disbanding it would be a mistake, and thinking that one could rebuild it before the upcoming hurricane season a bigger one. Rebuild it, restructure it, rework it, yes. Disband, then do those things? Stupid.

FEMA must deal with more than just hurricanes (the key letters here being "E" and "M"), and rushing the job in order to meet some semi-arbitrary calendar date is an invitation for further disaster. The government is incapable of breaking anything down and reconstructing it without the requisite commissions, panels and blue-ribbon task forces, not to mention the fact that the Democrats would be in no mood to accomodate anything that this President would want, no matter how worthy.

What are the possible solutions? Here are a couple:

-- Move FEMA out of the Department of Homeland Security: DHS is a majority law-enforcement bureacracy. FEMA responds to disasters and tries to preserve life. Not diametric opposites, but not complimentary, either.
-- Remove all political appointees without Emergency Management experience: FEMA, under the Bush administration, has become a dumping ground for people who deserve a reward for something they did for the President. Every president does the same thing, but FEMA is not the place to do it. They don't stand for such things at the Pentagon, and FEMA shouldn't either.The appointment of R. David Paulison is a good start.

On September 11th, the City of New York did a fantastic job, better than anything FEMA could have done, and that was a disaster nobody saw coming (well...no that's a topic for another post). FEMA's role should be to manage, not participate.

Congress' role should be to get out of the way.